


Fearsome Engines

by Triss_Hawkeye



Category: The Bifrost Incident - The Mechanisms (Album), The Mechanisms (Band)
Genre: Backstory, F/F, Norse Mythology references, Pre-Canon, Yuletide Treat, cosmic horror, trans loki
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-24
Updated: 2019-12-24
Packaged: 2021-02-25 21:27:57
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,300
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21932212
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Triss_Hawkeye/pseuds/Triss_Hawkeye
Summary: As she and Sigyn prepare to launch the missiles, Loki reflects on her time working on the Bifrost.
Relationships: Loki & Odin (The Bifrost Incident), Loki/Sigyn (The Bifrost Incident)
Comments: 8
Kudos: 54
Collections: Yuletide 2019





	Fearsome Engines

**Author's Note:**

  * For [MercutioLives](https://archiveofourown.org/users/MercutioLives/gifts).



Loki checks and re-checks her calculations. She hates this part, knowing what she does about the methods she is using, but she knows she is the only one who can do this. Certainly the only other people in existence who could come close are Odin and Baldur, and this goes against everything they've worked towards. At any rate, she’s still not sure whether Odin ever fully grasped the dark fundamentals of the Bifrost's mathematics or whether she was too possessed by her obsession with the project to care, and Baldur’s forte was more in the production side of things than in the theory. 

Loki had liked working with Baldur at first—he was smart, and mostly lived up to his reputation of being good-hearted, at least on the surface. But he was unflinchingly loyal to his mother and too naive to suspect her of any sinister ulterior motive. And as pleasing and unthreatening as his persona amongst Asgardian society was, Loki had known him to be as ardent a supporter of the All-Mother’s tyrannical rule of the Yggdrasil system as any of her most zealous followers. 

That had never used to bother Loki so much, back then. She chews on her stylus and is ashamed at that memory of herself.

In any case, her efforts to raise her concerns with either of them had been firmly dismissed, and so she’d left the project. If she was being honest, she had never felt like herself in Asgard anyway, even with her status as one of Asgard’s favoured sons, alongside Baldur and his half-brother Thor. Though in truth she was nearer in age to All-Mother Odin than she was to the other two, the three of them had been close years ago, before Odin had started dreaming of the project that would consume the decades to follow. Their life was comfortable and privileged but Loki still felt an unease with the attention and celebrity that she wouldn’t be able to name for a long time afterward. So, given the opportunity to vanish from the limelight into the theoretical physics that would enable Odin’s vision, she gratefully took it. Thor had no head for science and no interest in his mother’s pet project. Baldur, Loki suspected, had entered the project more to curry his mother’s favour than out of personal interest, but had nonetheless shown talent and enthusiasm, both in the development of the technology and in being the palatable public face of the operation. 

Loki had been proud of their work at first. It drew from several advanced and obscure branches of multi-dimensional mathematics, and necessitated the development of new ones—activities her cunning and clever mind found delight in, and which drew admiration from both academia and Odin herself. The Bifrost project grew from an idea into a theoretically achievable plan, several moderately successful (if highly technical) mathematical journal articles on the new field of track theory, and the first ever working model of a stable wormhole, which connected one end of Odin’s lab to the other and glowed with shifting rainbow light at each heavily shielded entrance. They’d nicknamed it Mimir. Loki was so enthralled by the work that she even managed to forget her own unease with herself. But then things turned strange. 

While at this point there was an entire engineering team attached to the project, the advances in track theory were solely spear-headed by Loki and Odin working together, spending days at a time improving algorithms, running simulations, and sometimes plain old scrawling on a blackboard. But all that changed after the accident. Loki didn’t know what happened—no one did but Odin herself—but one night, alone in the lab, something went wrong with the shielding and stability measures for Mimir. The resulting exotic surge almost blew through one of the walls and took out one of Odin’s eyes. To his credit, Baldur moved quickly to establish the story as an otherwise benign lab accident due to some improbable bad luck, and made sure the press had plenty of photographs of Odin in good spirits, laughing off the injury as the “price to be paid for progress”. 

Secretly, Loki wondered if Odin had disabled the shielding herself.

After that, Odin started making progress in track theory at an alarming rate, calculating new geometries overnight that would have taken the two of them months of work before, charging into Loki’s office with solutions to problems that were barely half-formed to begin with, and developing mathematical abstractions using an entirely new system of angular glyphs for notation that somehow united previously unconnected concepts. When challenged about this, all Odin would say was that her dreams were becoming clearer, before running off to do something else incomprehensible. Which left Loki to pick up the pieces of her wild outbursts and try to piece together the underlying theory Odin no longer had time for. And its strange implications.

The more Loki filled in the gaps and implemented Odin’s workings, the more disturbed she became at what she learned. Elaborate runic circles properly etched into specific materials somehow channeled fundamental energies she hadn’t even known existed. Convoluted and unsettling methods for bismuth crystal growth caused its diamagnetic properties to go through the roof and completely upturned accepted theories of magnetic levitation. Certain geometric formulae that by all rights should have had measurable effects on space-time under the new theories were inert until she accidentally bled from a paper cut onto her test sample and almost turned her workbench into a singularity. And all the while, she couldn’t shake the feeling that there was some consciousness at work in all this, something vast and sinister. It seemed entirely unreasonable to think so, but it rattled her enough to raise her concerns about the direction of the project with Odin. 

Odin had had no patience for her misgivings, so instead she took a leave of absence and decided on a whim to spend some time on Midgard, away from Asgard’s constant attention. Of course, a famous Asgardian slumming it on Midgard wasn’t the sort of thing to go unnoticed either, but her charm, wit, and unconventional air won her the attention of the more avant-garde side of Midgardian high society, who attracted attention in their own ways but tended to stay out of the tabloids. 

That’s where she met Sigyn. 

Sigyn had been captivating from the beginning—long brown hair and gorgeous dark skin, never seen without striking makeup and her impeccable taste in jewellery. Upon approach she was a witty and entertaining conversationalist, with an astonishing intuition for incisive comments, which would make one feel threatened were it not for the kindness with which she made them. She also threw the most incredible parties, Asgardian curfews and drug restrictions be damned. 

The more time Loki spent with her, though, the more she realised that Sigyn was not just a talented socialite. She was an opener of eyes. Sigyn opened Loki’s eyes to the systematic mistreatment of the Midgardian people under Asgard’s rule. Loki had spent so long being drawn into the maelstrom of the Bifrost project and Odin’s increasing erraticness within it that she’d not even considered the effect it would have on her handling of Midgard. And Sigyn patiently led her from the disaster of under-funding and mismanagement of Midgard today to understanding the underlying systems that had already been oppressing her people for decades before that. 

Loki’s eyes were opened to her own complicity, not just in Odin’s increasingly sinister science, but in the mundane corruption of Asgard. But they were opened to herself as well. Sigyn was one of the few people who had ever asked her who she really was, and stayed with her to hear the truth, not just some new soundbite for a gossip-hungry public. She was an attentive and compassionate listener, and so it was in talking with Sigyn that Loki was finally able to name for herself the truth that had unsettled her all of her life: she was not a son of Asgard at all. She was a woman. 

Loki was well and truly in love at that point, and free and happy in a way she had never experienced before. She wanted to stay on Midgard forever, spending hours with Sigyn in her rooms discussing politics over champagne and becoming intimately familiar with each others’ bodies. After two years away, however, Odin was beginning to lose patience, and summoned her back to Asgard. Loki kissed Sigyn goodbye and took the long, three-month journey back to her home planet. 

All of her discussions with Sigyn about Asgard had been in the abstract, a recontextualisation of old memories that became fuzzier the longer she stayed away. But upon arriving back there, Loki started to pay attention, and began to see the truth beneath its gilded surface—the fearsome engines of Yggdrasil society itself, the resources of an entire star system hoarded by a single privileged people. She realised with a pang that she could never again feel at home on Asgard. And that she didn’t mind that prospect as much as she’d thought she might. 

Her reappearance in the Asgard social scene, public coming out, and eccentric Midgardian fashion choices all caused a stir among the populace. In comparison, her official departure from the Bifrost project was quieter. She backed up her old work, briefed herself on the developments over the past year or so, and then handed in her resignation to Odin herself. The All-Mother was furious, but Loki didn’t stay to weather any of her wrath. She booked her journey back to Midgard the very next day.

The only farewell she shared with Baldur was a curt nod, and she suspected Odin had played a part in chilling that friendship in Loki’s absence. She didn’t even say goodbye to Thor before she departed for the spaceport, but she found him waiting for her in the departure lounge. This came as some surprise to Loki, as they had begun to drift apart long before her initial leave of absence. When he asked her why she was leaving, Loki evasively mentioned that she had found it increasingly difficult to work alongside Odin. It wasn’t exactly a lie.

Thor gave a sympathetic shrug, as though he knew the exact feeling. “For what it’s worth,” he told her. “You look happy now. A lot happier than you used to. Whatever you’ve found on Midgard… it’s done you good, and I’m glad. Go back there and enjoy it.”

Loki smiled at him gratefully. “You take care of yourself, Thor,” she told him, before boarding her shuttle. 

She proposed to Sigyn almost immediately upon setting foot back on Midgard. The two of them vanished into the Midgardian underground soon after.

Loki leaving the Bifrost project clearly hadn’t slowed their efforts, though, and she was unable to put it out of mind, following whatever news of its progress filtered down into Midgard. The team grew from a single science lab to a veritable army of engineers and technicians, beginning work on the system-wide infrastructure that would enable the train. A full-sized wormhole gateway began construction in Asgard, and a few years later, work commenced for the Midgardian counterpart. So that is why Loki finds herself here and now, poring over a pilfered copy of the Midgardian portal schematics and a tablet full of mock-up runic inscriptions she’s double-checking against her notes. Because if her warnings and departure were not enough to stop Odin’s obsession, she will have to take more drastic measures. And there is going to be a test-run of the track in a week’s time.

“Still here, my love?” Loki closes the worst of the windows open on her tablet as Sigyn comes up behind her and wraps her arms around her shoulders. 

Loki gives a noncommittal hum and leans back into her embrace. “Just checking my working.”

Sigyn is too interested in Loki’s life and far too smart for her to be able to hide track theory from her entirely. Loki even taught her some of the basics, had her help to reprogram the stolen missiles for this job, wiring and computer chips spilling from the severe metal cylinders as they carefully adjusted their programming, working side by side in a small nondescript workshop owned by Ivaldi, a friend in the resistance. Sigyn in particular is well known and respected within the resistance—her strength is gentle, but is none the lesser for it. She is an excellent communicator and coordinator, and unafraid of hard work. 

But it is precisely to protect that gentleness that Loki never told her the details of how bad it had become after Odin’s accident. All the resistance know is that the train will enable Asgard’s grip on Midgard to tighten—and after all, that is not entirely a lie. The terrible developments brought forth from Odin’s dream, Loki keeps to herself. That dark knowledge should be spread to as few people as possible, and though the equations and geometries fill her with dread as she constructs them, she will bear that dread herself and inflict it upon no other. 

So she puts down her tablet, and lets Sigyn pull her away to bed. They will make love, and afterwards, when Sigyn is asleep, Loki will sneak back into the workshop and carry on her task alone, engraving the runes onto the inside of the missile cases that will make them fit for travel in the Bifrost, attaching the bismuth inlays and spinning disks required for their aim to stay true while all of reality twists around them, and spilling her own blood into the grooves she carves, a gruesome offering to hold at bay whatever dark powers truly lie behind the maddening rainbow wormhole.

She hopes it will be enough.

**Author's Note:**

> Trans Loki is an A++ headcanon, I'm glad I was able to find the time to write this! Happy Yuletide!
> 
> Song title is from [this Mechs-adjacent train song](https://softwire.bandcamp.com/track/fearsome-engines).


End file.
